The drive from Reagan National to the northern Shenandoah entrance is ninety minutes on a Saturday morning. [1] Skyline Drive runs the full hundred-and-five miles of the park, with seventy-five overlooks; the speed limit is thirty-five and the road is the trip. [2] Mary's Rock, in the northern district, is a 3.7-mile out-and-back through dense forest with a Shenandoah Valley view at the top — ninety minutes if the hiker keeps pace. [2]

The paper's Friday account of a sealed Churchill Downs track and Renegade as soft favorite at the 152nd Kentucky Derby reads, on this Saturday, as a reason to be elsewhere. Derby post is 6:57 p.m. Eastern. Mary's Rock at sunset is at 8:13.

Three lodges and four campgrounds sit inside the park. Skyland and Big Meadows are the two with restaurants; Lewis Mountain is cabin-only and the cheapest. [3] Reservations the morning of are possible in May because the school calendar still holds. The wildflowers peak in the second week of May — trillium, columbine, jack-in-the-pulpit — and the waterfalls are the loudest they will be until October. [4]

Charlottesville is forty-five minutes south of the park's southern entrance. Monticello is a half-day. The Downtown Mall is a long lunch. The reader can come back through Front Royal and reach Washington by midnight. The Derby will already be over.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York